The bandits had been waiting for three hours for the stagecoach to pass. At 5 p.m. on May 30, 1899, it finally rattled down the track in Kane Spring Canyon, Ariz., and the duo made their move. Stepping out from behind a roadside bush and armed with six-shooters and Winchester rifles, they ordered the driver to stop, forcing him and his three passengers to alight.
Lining them up on the ground, the robbers went through the victims’ pockets, helping themselves to hundreds of dollars, firearms and jewelry. When one of the passengers resisted, the smaller of the bandits — wearing blue overalls and coarse boots that were clearly too big — laid down the law: “Cough up, partner,” he gruffly said, “or I’ll plug you.”
Those were the only words the thief spoke the whole time — because she was afraid of being discovered as a woman. The heist over, Pearl Hart, “The Bandit Queen,” rode off into notoriety.
In “Wildcat: The Untold Story of Pearl Hart, The Wild West’s Most Notorious Woman Bandit” (Hanover Square Press), out Tuesday, author John Boessenecker reveals just who the real Pearl Hart was — and it’s not who many historians believe her to be. Contrary to popular accounts, Pearl Hart wasn’t born in Kansas, nor was she the daughter of a wealthy Canadian family. She didn’t perform with Buffalo Bill Cody’s famous Wild West Show and she certainly didn’t go to boarding school.
No, “Pearl Hart” was born Lillie Naomi Davy on April 19, 1871, in the lumbering community of Lindsay in Ontario, Canada. Her father, Albert Davy, was a violent alcoholic who had served time for the attempted rape of a 14-year-old girl at knifepoint and who, Boessenecker suggests, likely abused his own daughters, too.
Like her husband, Anna Davy could neither read nor write. Between 1867 and 1885, she would give birth to nine children — Lillie being the third — and struggle to make ends meet, a situation compounded by her husband’s drinking and abuse. He once served 15 days in jail for kicking Anna and their children out of the family home and forcing them to live on the street, begging for food.
Later, Anna was gang-raped by four men at their shanty house, with her kids in the next room. She was five months pregnant at the time.
With an absent father and “no food, no job, no money and no choice,” Lillie Davy and most of her siblings took to petty crime and were habitually housed in juvenile correction facilities. One brother, 10-year-old Henry, would take his younger sisters and even their toddler brother on his burglaries. Lillie and three of her sisters, meanwhile, all worked as prostitutes. She even took her pseudonym, Pearl Hart, from a madam she had known in Buffalo. In “Wildcat,” Boessenecker explains that Lillie Davy was already working as a prostitute from as young as 13. When she was 15, she tried and failed to elope with a 36-year-old carpenter.
‘Pearl Hart was a woman far ahead of her time. She was self-reliant . . . and sexually liberated.’
John Boessenecker, author
But then, marriage never really suited her.
As both Lillie Davy and Pearl Hart, she was married many times, sometimes officially, sometimes not. She left some husbands because they were just as abusive as her estranged father. Others, like Earl Lighthawk (who was also one of her sister Katy’s former lovers), she married using a pseudonym, as did he, as they were both still married to other people. In an argument over Hart’s infidelity, Lighthawk later shot himself in the head but survived, and the couple later welcomed a baby daughter, Saphronia Millie, in 1906.
Boessenecker also maintains that Hart had two more children, a boy and then a girl, and it’s believed that she sent them away to live with one of her sisters in Ohio.
Lillie and Katy ran away from home to avoid their “worthless wretch” of a father, cutting their hair short and wearing boys’ clothes not just to avoid detection but also to avoid the sexual advances of men while they were traveling. When they were caught committing crimes, the idea that two young girls in disguise could be capable of such things immediately caught the eye of the press: “On the Warpath — the Notorious Davy Girls Make Trouble for the Police” was one headline.
It was the kind of notoriety that would follow Lillie Davy — or Pearl Hart — for her entire life as she traversed the country with assorted rascals and reprobates, including Charles Dean, a streetcar brakeman by day and burglar by night, and pianist Dan Bandman, who not only robbed her of her life savings but was so abusive that Hart tried to kill herself “three or four times during their relationship.” While she appeared to revel in her celebrity, regaling scores of interviewers with her tales of adventures, all Hart ever wanted, according to Boessenecker, was “total obscurity.”
But that was never an option, not after the events of May 30, 1899.
While she was in the silver mining town of Globe, Ariz., working in what was euphemistically called a miners’ boarding house (a k a a brothel), Hart received notice that her ailing mother was suffering with heart disease and close to death back in Kansas City. Desperate to see her but without the means to get home, Hart hatched a plan with her lover at the time, a former shoemaker from Chicago who went by the name of Joe Boot: They would hold up a stagecoach.
Hart, disguised as a man, led the ambush, robbing the driver and three passengers of $469, some pistols and a gold watch. She was arrested before making it back to Kansas. But her mother, Anna, wouldn’t die for another 16 years.
When Hart was finally tracked down and arrested a week later, she was remanded in Pima County Jail in Tucson, where her fame had preceded her. Visited by a succession of reporters, photographers and adoring fans, she was even given a bobcat by an admirer, which she was allowed to keep as a pet.
She also met and fell in love with another inmate, Ed Hogan, but when her bobcat bit him, he picked it up and hurled it onto the stone floor, killing it instantly. As an apology, Hogan agreed to help Hart escape and having cut a hole in the wall of her cell, they pair made it as far as the local rail depot, boarding a freight train to New Mexico before being apprehended.
Though Hart was returned to prison, the jailbreak merely served to enhance her status as a national folk hero and feminist icon. “Pearl Hart was a women far ahead of her time,” writes Boessenecker. “She was self-reliant, adventurous, unconstrained by convention and sexually liberated. These attributes were extremely rare for a woman in the 19th century.”
It’s a view reinforced by Hart’s own brand of feminism. When she was arrested for the stagecoach robbery in 1899, for example, she told the court in Tucson that she would “never consent to be tried under a law she or her sex had no voice in making.”
It didn’t work.
Though one of the victims refused to give his name and press charges, likely because he had recognized Hart from one of the many brothels he had visited, the others went ahead. Hart was sentenced to five years imprisonment; Boot, her co-conspirator, was given 30 years.
She would serve her sentence as the only female resident among 260 prisoners at the infamous Yuma Territorial Prison, a “repulsive hellhole” on the banks of the Colorado river. She arrived by train, accompanied by lawmen and smoking a large cigar, and immediately became the “supreme object of desire” for the rest of the prison’s inmates.
Despite the conditions, Yuma would prove to be a transformative experience for Pearl Hart. When she was granted early parole in 1902 — largely because of an outbreak of smallpox in the prison — she had not only weaned herself off a chronic morphine addiction but also become a skilled seamstress. She’d learned to read, write and compose poetry. Meanwhile, her sister Katy enjoyed success of her own, writing a play about Hart called “The Arizona Female Bandit.”
America was shocked and thrilled by the idea of a female outlaw. Newspapers clamored for interviews with Hart, while Cosmopolitan, a new magazine at the time, was obsessed with her, often sending reporters to try to get quotes out of her. She was regularly portrayed as daring and devious, romantic and free-spirited, even though the reality of Hart’s gritty existence was anything but.
It’s one of the reasons there are so many “falsehoods and folklore” about her life, as Boessenecker calls them. Visit her Wikipedia page and you’ll essentially be reading the life story of someone else. There, you will see she was born “Pearl Taylor” and that she died in 1954, under the name “Pearl Bywater.” According to Boessenecker, she actually died 20 years earlier at her daughter’s home in Los Angeles, later being interred in Rose Hill Memorial Park, under her married name Lillie Naomi Meyers.
While Hart herself certainly embellished her story in interviews, it’s also true that Hollywood has never really been accurate in its portrayal of women in the Old West. There were, for instance, no such thing as “cowgirls” in the Old West,” as the term was only ever used to describe female performers in circus shows. And, contrary to what you might have seen on the silver screen, there wasn’t a single female gunfighter back then.
That’s what really marks Pearl Hart’s story as remarkable: She led a life at odds with societal norms and convention.
“The vast majority of women in the nineteenth century did not have sexual relations outside of marriage,” writes Boessenecker. “They did not smoke, and they certainly did not use opium and morphine. They did not wear men’s clothing, ride astraddle or carry six-shooters. Pearl Hart broke all these taboos and then some. She swore, smoked, drank, robbed, rode hard, broke [out of] jail and used men with abandon.
“The Old West never saw another woman like her.”
